Time Is Your Most Precious Commodity

Image by ToniVC via Flickr

They say misery loves company. And there’s never a shortage of fellow time-strapped content marketers who are willing to commiserate with you about how little time they have to get everything done each day.

It’s one of the easiest conversations to strike up on social sites, Skype, or at meetups. And when we find a fellow content publisher we glom onto each other like long lost friends for the opportunity to talk to someone who understands what we go through to practice our craft.

Check the list below and see if it seems familiar to you.

A day in the life of a content publisher:

Wake up thinking about how to engage, entertain, or inform your market today.

Sit down to check email, or feeds, or whatever tools you’ve pieced together to deliver you the latest news in your market.

Search for a trend, a theme for the day, something interesting to publish that will be news to your readers.

Gather your thoughts, come up with a post idea, and get to work.

Publish, then get to work on syndication.

Update your social networks.

Reply to comments on-site and around your networks.

Start thinking about the next post.

Answer emails.

Schedule interviews.

Network and maybe get a guest post nailed down for this week.

There are countless little things that go with each of the above tasks. And there are many more specific tasks individual content publishers undertake in a day.

So, if we find anything at all that has an inkling of a chance to save us time, we get pretty excited about it. We content marketers also typically belong to scores of sites which promise to help us be more effective and efficient with our time. The biggest promise of software is time savings. The most popular software on the planet is always something that saves us time.

How to be a Time Bandit

Check up on your processes regularly. Are you using the latest technology, and using it properly, to save time and become as efficient a content publisher as possible? Sometimes we stick to comfortable but outdated processes and tools that can be upgraded or replaced with something new and better. Is Google Reader still the best way for you to track news? Or should you incorporate a personal aggregation tool into the mix?

Start following people who share the same burdens with you and watch for things they do/use to help them save time. Or just ask them point blank what they do to be efficient.

Fun and fulfillment. Seek out ways to make content marketing more fun and satisfying. This can actually be a time-saver because when you are excited about something, you can’t wait to get it “out there” for people to see and react. It focuses you on the goal in front of you and often forces you into a mode of efficiency you’re not used to. (Beware: having too much fun can also stick you in a time-suck, as well!)

Take breaks. Workaholics are sometimes the least productive people, which is why they seem to have to work all the time. Breaks can give you ideas, reset your focus, and make you more productive when you get back to your desk. The workaholic sees this as time wasted. But starting at your screen for 5 minutes in a zombie state is not getting much done, even though you’re still sitting at your desk!

Ruthlessly throw out what’s not working. New tools and shiny objects come into our lives daily that promise to help us save time. Most of them don’t end up being used all that much after awhile. But they linger in the back of your mind as things that need to be tended;. Your guilt from not using something that you started using because it was supposed to save you time can make you “tend” to it and waste time. If it doesn’t solve your time problem, get rid of it!

When you have a really good system for sourcing and publishing great content ideas, it is possible to get your job done in a lot less time. This leaves more time for breaks and other important aspects of proper content marketing such as networking and working on a new product or longer-term goals.

Curation is a tool used mainly to 1) save time, and 2) create even better, more engaging content for your readers at the same time. Think about how you can curate to save your most precious commodity while giving your readers more of what they want. It may seem like saving time and creating better, more engaging content would be at odds with each other. Yet both outcomes are possible.

It’s time well spent to periodically reflect on the processes you use to do your job. Often the biggest productivity gains are found by tweaking your process and keeping up on new tools to help you automate.

What Our Users Say

I just started using Curationsoft in order to start curating technology news for my website. Within days, I stopped using the other curation software I had previously purchased and switched entirely to Curationsoft. The interface is so intuitive that I still have not watched all of the training videos - but I learn completely new techniques each time I do watch a new one. The ability to easily use this in conjunction with Facebook is amazing and will be a great way to drive traffic to my site. In addition to curation for my blog, I have also been using it for research. If you open a Google Drive document and drag research content found with CurationSoft over into the document, you not only have a great all-in-one-place resource - but your bibliography is nearly built if you need to provide sources. I am using it for researching compliance in the mortgage finance field and it has already been an amazing time saver. Finally, I am completely blown away by your amazing customer support. I opened one support ticket to take care of a password issue (my fault) that was responded to almost immediately. The second ticket was opened to point out a minor bug which - was fixed within a day or two. Thanks for creating this fine software and providing such great support. I happily give CurationSoft five stars!
Marvin S.

I have used the software in numerous sites to enable me to select and add a range of curated content and I find it easy and simple to use, while at the same time powerful to attract truly dynamic content. I use the software to find interesting and useful content for some of my sites and I still wish to learn more about using the software to the max. Content curation is core to the future development of sites as we all need good quality and reliable content to add to sites on a daily basis.
Paul S.

CurationSoft benefits our business by the relative ease it provides in obtaining great content at ease along with the ability to drag and drop the information to posts. It has a nice interface and it is definitely a time saver. I have ranked pages on the first page of Google with the curated content that was added to posts using your software. I earn $1ooo a month from 1 of my clients using your software on average, so the software has definitely made a positive contribution financially. I use the software to primarily add current up to date relevant content for my clients websites. Content curation basically is weaving together great content from different sources around the web to have a great page of great content for the end user. It brings steady traffic due to the search engines indexing great content. It is awesome.
Ayanna T.

I use CurationSoft to help grab content for Tier 2 and Tier 3 sites for ranking purposes. It allows me to create decent looking sites with good content for SEO reasons when working to rank a certain site. Content is king, and great content is always best! I basically repurpose expired domains and use the software to do it quickly and natural looking. I get paid for my SEO services for clients and use the software a lot: I use it to get content quickly to build out sites that link to my client or 'money' sites that need to look good and hold up to human evaluation. Content curation gives me the ability to use relevant topics, content, videos for a specific niche and find quality content and quality authority links quickly to build out a site.
Mike H.

CurationSoft helps in finding fresh content to fill our blog with news and updates. The more news and updates you add to your site, the better in terms of quality and search engine love.We have had increased traffic to our news site and hold top 10 rankings for niche related news.This news site has helped indirectly by referring clients to us in related industries. It has also helped to establish us as an authority in the industry. We use it to stay in tune with news and blog posts related to martial arts movies, sports, etc. Content curation, once you get used to it provides fresh insight and helps to quickly overcome writers block.

Richard B

CurationSoft helped me overall to improve my "image" with clients since I'm no longer "just" the SEO-guy, since I made it part of my "package", and really only use it as a competitive advantage.I use it a lot for my offline clients to get them an idea of what blogs to put out, where to find them and what to put how and where. I often show it off in a meeting, where we go online and look up articles/info pertaining to their business. We then compare it with stuff they have on their website.It's VERY valuable to have ONE piece of software to get the info my clients need to become better bloggers.

CurationSoft makes content creation faster, and allows me to curate content and know I put together a quality post. Not some garbage spin or autopost. The software helps me find content and it does an excellent job doin it. I use it to add content to my personal blog and other websites I run. So the bottom line is, the software gets me content fast, and saves me hours of time that I used to spend (and dread spending) to create something useful.

CurationSoft helps expediting research in locating relevant content. Access to Twitter, YouTube, Google News & Flickr makes for varied and vast resources. Further emotional comfort by realizing that the content found is copyright safe. The ability to search by keyword then drag and drop, edit and post is fast and easy. Pingback creation saves time by not having to grovel, or worse, pay, for backlinks. Insertion of digitally rich media improves visitor experience. I have not tracked search engine rankings, but generally have more visits. It is so easy that I use the software when I am on my treadmill desk, so I can get a workout while easily adding pages of content.
Rod A.

We manage over 80 websites and CurationSoft allows us to post interesting and unique content quickly and easily on a regular basis from one place. Before we had CurationSoft it was a time consuming process to find and edit content and the login to each site and make a post. Now it's really very easy. The curated posts we make to each site add weight both in terms of number of posts and credibility in terms of people having confidence we know what we're are talking about. I have no hard evidence but I'm sure it helps convert to a sale of our products as customers often reference posts in their communications with us.I have an assistant use the software to post interesting news items to 2 to 3 of our 80+ sites on a daily basis. It's quick and easy to do and does not take her more than 5 mins per post. Before it would have taken her 30 mins per post, maybe longer.It enables us to keep our customers and prospects in touch with our industry niche and provide a service which both find valuable. Because of the speed we are able to post valuable content on a lot of sites, quickly and regularly for low cost.
-Richard C

CS enables me to share crucial info with members of my congregation who do not have the time to do the kind of research I do.
Michael D: